A Contrastive Study Of The Sanitization Translation Strategies Of Culture-Specific Items In Chinese Versions Of Harry Potter

This thesis aims to explore the "sanitization" translation strategies adopted in the translation of culture-specific item (CSI) in Chinese versions of Harry Potter by means of corpus linguistic tools. The definition of culture-specific item given by Aixela is that "the textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a source text involve a translation problem in their transference to a target text, whenever this problem is a product of the nonexistence of the referred item or of its different intertextual status in the cultural system of the readers of the target text". In other words, any linguistic item could be a CSI as long as it poses a problem of ideological or cultural opacity or acceptability, for the average reader or for any agent with power in the target culture. In this paper, the average reader refers to the children. Sanitization is defined in this thesis as translation strategies that remove or weaken the negative effect to the understanding and mental development in the field of translated children’s literature. Also, in this study, three specific translation strategies are classified as sanitization. namely, absolute universalization (i.e. to choose a neutral reference, which is not a CSI.). deletion and naturalization (the three strategies were proposed by Aixela in his study on translation strategies of culture-specific items in1996) while other translation strategies discovered in the study are considered as non-sanitization including transliteration and Linguistic (non-cultural) translation. Two hypotheses are proposed in this thesis:First, sanitization is employed with a bigger proportion compared with the non-sanitization in translating the culture-specific items in both Mainland and Taiwan versions of Harry Potter, which may indicate that it could be possible for sanitization to be typical translation strategies in children literature translation. Second, sanitization is used more frequently in Mainland version than in Taiwan version. In other words, Mainland version has seen a higher level of sanitization.A parallel corpus has been built for this thesis. The corpus consists of the original texts of the whole series of Harry Potter and two Chinese versions of them, one from the mainland and the other one from Taiwan. Sanitization is examined in the translation of CSI in the two Chinese versions. The thesis focuses on two types of CSI. which are related to magic and political ideology. CSI related to magic are divided into two groups: magic games and spells (curses and incantation). Fifty representatives of them are chosen according to frequency and the difficulty level for children to understand. The strategies adopted in the translation for these CSI have been identified and analyzed in the corpus.The findings of the analysis are that sanitization is indeed employed with a bigger proportion compared with the non-sanitization in translating the culture-specific items (culture-specific items related to magic) in both Mainland and Taiwan versions of Harry Potter. As for the CSI related to political ideology, the sanitization strategy of deletion is mainly adopted. Therefore, it supports the first hypothesis. Moreover, the outcome of the comparative analysis shows that sanitization is employed more in Mainland version than Taiwan version which proves the second hypothesis and implies that translation norms of Mainland was more conservative then than that of Taiwan.